Two new items today!

 

We've been making them successfully for a while now, but today we were able to finally list these amazing multipurpose sprays on Etsy! You can get either a 2oz or 4oz bottle, and you can choose from any fragrance oil we have in stock. See the listing for more details!

Cucumber & Aloe soap - we've had soap with this fragrance in the shop for a while, but in this batch we also added some other nice oils and extracts. You can preorder this soap now, and it will ship after its cure ends on March 19th. :-)

Two new soaps and more to come!

There are two new soaps in the shop- one cold process and one hot process. Take a look!

Carlton fragrance - "Clouds and Sky" hot process soap

 We recently got a request to make a special hot process soap fragranced with Carlton and this was the result! We wanted to make the soap look like a cloudy sky, and since the soap is hot process, the edges and top are a bit more "rustic" than cold process soap- we think it just adds to the 'big fluffy clouds" theme. ;-) Carlton smells like orchid, with notes of champagne, rain, and musk overtones. (It's not a heavily floral scent at all.)

"Celtic Waters" - Shea and Cocoa Butter soap

Celtic Waters has a knock-your-socks-off fragrance that smells almost exactly like a popular brand of soap (of course, we can't tell you which!). We blended it with another clean, soapy, cologne-like fragrance for a little variation- the difference in this fragrance and the original is that this blend smells more like clean water, moss, and verbena. It leans more toward being a "man soap", but the fragrance is so fresh that ladies are sure to love it as well!

We have more soap to add soon, so check back with us! :-)

Bee-Free Balms are officially in the shop!

We've been working on Beeswax free lip balms for a while now, and since we got a request recently to make some in two of our most popular flavors, we thought it was time to officially add them to the Etsy shop! They are perfect for anyone who does not like to use animal products or has an allergy to bee products.

We decided to make the balms with Soy Wax, as it is readily available and doesn't add any flavor to the balms. The only difference is that the texture of the balms is a bit different- they feel more noticeable when you're wearing them but it's not unpleasant. In fact, since it's now Winter it feels pleasant to feel that extra protection on your lips.

Here are the first two flavors that are officially in stock- but keep in mind that you can order any balm and send a note asking for the Bee-free version and we'll take care of the rest!

Earl Grey with a Slice
Pure Vanilla

New Chocolate Balm in the store!

Last year sometime I was given the task of making a Chocolate Orange lip balm- well, it's finally done and in the shop!

It took a while- first, because life kept getting in the way, and second, because we had thought "hey, let's try a different Chocolate balm formula!" After a long trial-and-error-but-mostly-error testing period we decided to put that on hold for a while and make a Dark Chocolate Orange using our regular formula. The pre-shop popularity of this flavor shows once more that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it!"

We hope you'll try one of our Dark Chocolate Orange balms! (Remember, if you're interested in a bulk assortment of Minis, we do offer different discount levels. Send us a note anytime!)

Dark Chocolate Orange:
Clear tube - Black tube - Oval tube - Mini tube

A note on Minis

We got a note today and the person was wondering if we'll ever lower the price of the Minis from $.99... For various reasons, we can't offer our lowest price for individual Mini Aromatherapy or Lip Balm listings, but we offer bulk pricing at any time.

If you would like to place a bulk Mini order, please feel free to contact me. We do charge a single fee per custom listing of twenty cents to cover the fee Etsy charges us to create a listing, but the savings are definitely worth it. :-) We'll be sure to give you an update if the prices ever change for bulk batches of Minis.

Remember that you can also order Minis with custom labels! Contact us for details.

Want to win $10 worth of free Canfield Crafts products?

We thought it would be fun to host a simple guessing game to celebrate the end of Summer and the start of Autumn! Here's what you'll be guessing:

How many Minis (Lip Balm and Aromatherapy) did we ship from June 1- August 31, 2013?

Only one guess per person, please! Guess as high or as low as you like! We will only give you one small hint: Remember we're still a small business... if you guess in the thousands you'll be too high! 
 
Leave a comment here, send us an Etsy Conversation or a tweet, leave a message for us on Facebook, or send an e-mail with your guess. On October 1 we will look at all the guesses and find the closest one- if more than one person has the closest guess, we will take both names (or all three, etc) and choose randomly between them.

The winner will get to choose $10 of products from our Etsy shop!

** Update: Thank you to everyone who guessed on Etsy, Facebook, etc! A HUGE Congratulations to SW on Etsy for her winning guess! **

Etsyversary!

It's our shop's Etsy Anniversary! Save 10% on all orders for the next week (through 9.18.13) with this code: ETSYVERSARY - http://etsy.me/1eKQhCg

Better news than yesterday!

No fragrance oil tragedies today! ;-)

Wanted to mention that in the past few weeks we passed our 200th individual Etsy sale and our 150th person to favorite our Etsy shop- and today we reached the 50th "Like" on Facebook and the 8,000th blog visit. It's been an incredible year so far, full of challenges and rewarding experiences, and we hope the rest of the year will be just as good! (For all of you, as well!)

Oh, before I forget- be sure to stop by our facebook page in the first days of September to try your hand at our guessing game for a chance to win a few dollars worth of goodies from our Etsy shop!

See our products on OpenSky!

Help us open a shop by following us on OpenSky:
www.opensky.com/canfieldcrafts

Hope to see you there!

Today was awesome, but then... it wasn't.

Winding down my day at 4:15ish this afternoon and heard a weird noise in our garage, like somebody closing a window too hard. I wasn't too worried about it, and asked someone to check on it...

My three bins of fragrance oils had toppled- fortunately, from only about a foot off the ground, but still... The garage was already starting to smell like a jumble of fragrance oils and there was broken glass on the ground. (We've got old carpet on the garage floor so it's warm to walk out there.) In my shock I just imagined broken glass everywhere, all of our fragrances wasted- WOW, what an awful thought!

We took the bins, one by one, to the kitchen for cleanup and to assess the damage. Nobody was more relieved than me to find that only three bottles had actually broken. Sadly, they were brand new bottles, and they were three fragrances that absolutely do not go together- Herbal Essence, Cream Cheese Frosting, and Moonlight Pomegranate (all Bramble Berry, and amazing fragrances on their own!). I mean, if I had accidentally made some amazing, never-thought-of blend, I totally would have saved the oil. But no... Herbal musk cream cheese floral frosting spice. Not fun.

The cleanup was all uphill from there. We had to glove up, wash the oil off of each bottle with dish soap, carefully dry them, and we also gave each bottle a rubdown with Clorox cleanup to kill any leftover fragrance. Took. Hours. It's a very strange thing to think about, but I spent a lot of the time being very happy that the labels that many suppliers use are very high quality. Four of the five companies' labels held up under all of that really well, with very little peeling or running. (We spent most of the cleanup time rewriting the labels on the bottles of one supplier. Their products are top-quality, but it struck me as odd that you would not have an oil-resistant label on a bottle of fragrance oil. Maybe people smashing their bottles doesn't come up much.) Our Bramble Berry fragrance bottles' labels were some of the hardest hit by spilled fragrance oil, but they came through it not too worse for wear. On some of them, you can't even tell that they went through an oil dousing, soapy water and bleach spray. (Have I mentioned that I LOVE BB's waterproof label paper? I have. Several times.) It makes me glad we use the same tough paper for our products. It's a small thought, but it was reassuring.

Tomorrow I have to give our house the sniff test to see if I dripped fragrance oil anywhere and clean it up. If you think about it, we did spill a full 12 ounces of fragrance oil between our garage and the fragrance bins. Scary.

Today's additions - Lip balms galore!

Three new additions today- classic flavors Vanilla Mint, Raspberry Earl Grey, and Chocolate Raspberry are in the shop in Clear tubes, Black tubes, and Oval tubes! We've had several requests to make full tubes of these popular flavors, so we hope you'll check them out now that they're here.

Within the next week the long, long, long awaited new flavor will be here, in Minis and full tubes! We're excited about how well it turned out but... you'll have to wait a few more days to try it out! ;-)

PS- The addition of these three flavors in full tubes means that all of our lip balm flavors are now available in full tubes. Thanks to all who requested flavors!

Happy accident!

I had to make a change to one of the new lip balm flavors after I had poured them, so I had to de-tube them (not a word). I am glad I did! One of the balms had no base! I usually check that carefully but this time around I had missed one. :-( Whatever poor person had gotten that balm would have been sadly disappointed, twisting and twisting away! I had to empty it with a metal skewer and some help from the microwave (but not at the same time, for obvious reasons).

Now that I think of the subject, here are some things you can do with a lip balm tube when it's empty. (Best idea... ever? LED Flash light.) Please Reuse or Recycle your leftover tubes!

Post Roundup - Shampoo

Ever have a blog/website that you end up getting lost for hours browsing around in? For me, Point of Interest is one of those! This time around I was looking for info on making shampoo. We're on our last bottle and I'd like not to buy shampoo from the store again if I can help it. Here are few of Swift's posts that have helped me get started with confidence. Please be sure to visit Point of Interest as well- today's post is about, guess what? Shampoo!

Back to Basics - What is a Shampoo?
Formulating a regular shampoo
Extended instructions for making shampoo
Conditioning shampoo for dry hair 

Buy Susan's e-book on hair care formulation at Lotioncrafter

Review by the Lip Balm Wrangler!

Our mini balms, aka "Bullet Balms", were featured today on Christina (the Lip Balm Wrangler)'s blog, and we are thrilled that our lip balms received 5 out of 5 twists! Thank you, Christina, for the absolutely lovely review!

Check out her review of 5 flavors at her blog.

Be sure to subscribe to posts at LipBalmWrangler.com or visit Christina's Facebook for her thoughts on lip balms and glosses of all sizes and flavors!

The Power of Positive (Feedback, that is)

I was talking to a friend the other day about the reasons to leave positive feedback when you shop online, and I thought I'd take some time to talk about it here as well. Why is feedback important, and how can you make your feedback more helpful to online businesses?

Nowadays a lot of our shopping is done online, so it's convenient, but it can also tend to be faceless and impersonal. Small businesses and shops spring up every day on eBay and Etsy (to name just two major places people shop). Many are excellent, but depend on word of mouth for customers. You can have a hand in helping a business succeed and improve with your feedback!

Helpful feedback lets the shop owner know what they're doing right. Did the item ship quickly, arrive well packaged and in the condition described? Was the person you communicated with friendly and open to answering questions?  You can leave positive feedback for any one of these reasons if the service was good. If you feel like writing a quick note about the good service you received, even better! Believe it or not, the simplest reason to leave feedback (even if the customer service was just the normal amount of communication and no more) is that it lets the shop owner know you received the item. Unless the person who ships your item asks for delivery confirmation, sometimes they have no way of knowing if you got your package (besides e-mailing you). Even if you never write a note in the feedback section, that's okay- clicking the "positive" button or leaving those is five stars is still helpful to the shop.

Constructive feedback is the kind that shop owners like the most because it helps them know which direction to go in. If you liked something specific about the product you bought, great! Let the shop owner know! If you didn't really like it, but you're happy with the customer service, it's still valuable to let them know. Some people might not feel comfortable telling someone "I didn't really like...", and it's definitely a hard phrase to hear when you've worked hard on something. Both take a bit of practice. If you feel able, leave the positive feedback about their good customer service, quick shipping, etc- then also send an e-mail or note explaining what you feel the product needed. It takes a little thought, a bit of time, and a lot of tact- but a crafter/seller who wants to be the best at what they do will appreciate hearing what their customers want!

Leaving positive feedback, even if you don't leave any note, is still helpful for one very important (but often overlooked) reason: It protects the shop from trolling or abuse in the future. Yes, you can definitely provide some excellent insight for the shop owner with your feedback, but the whole purpose of feedback is to let others know how the shop measures up, right? Don't get me wrong- if you have had an awful experience with a shop and can't resolve the matter with the owner, leaving negative feedback is absolutely your right (I've done it as a last resort, and believe it or not, still got a snippy, sarcastic response from the shop owner. Wow!). But everyone has seen some poor unsuspecting shop owner get blasted by someone for something that clearly wasn't their fault, or that they are obviously trying (complete with groveling) to make right. Wouldn't it be great if every single person before that who'd had a good experience with that shop had let people know? It would make the troller's comments suspect, at the very least.

A business can only grow if it has a record of trust with the people it serves. With the "feedback" page that so many sites offer, everyone who shops can have a hand in helping the good reputation of a business. Please don't neglect to leave positive feedback when you shop online!